: : No idea at all. Can you give any more context from your source? Who is speaking? Is it meant to be literal, as the mayor of a town has only unpaved dirt streets, or figurative somehow?

: Also, is it British or N American in origin. 'Pavement' has different meanings on each side of the Atlantic. In the UK the word applies to what is called 'sidewalk' in the US. In the US it means, I believe, the road surface. There is no really universal word in Britain - we tend to say 'the road surface', or the 'tarmac' in some circumstances.

Yes, in the U.S. it is "pavement." Of course, on White Oak Mountain in W.Va., we called it "the hard road."